Fiction

George and Millie are staying with their Grandad in Wybrook while their parents are out of the country. On the night of the midsummer solstice, George sets out on an unauthorised quest to try and recover his Grandad’s pocket-watch, which he had carelessly lost earlier in the day. And disappears, without trace. When George goes missing, it is left to his sister alone to work out what has happened to him. Surely, everyone knows that people don’t just disappear! But as Millie starts to unveil the truth, and finds that this is not the first time someone has gone missing at Midsummer, she uncovers hidden secrets, hinting at something more unbelievable than she could ever have imagined, as she and her brother are plunged into a world of mystery, myths and peril, harking back to the Dark Ages, and the long-forgotten Kingdom of the East Saxons, in an enigmatic thriller by a writer with a new, unique voice.

As with an Impressionist painting, where the image emerges from the dots, in this book a story emerges from the chaos of the writing, revealing a Twenty-First Century woman trying to make sense of a world gone mad.

The first question anybody wants to know when they pick up a book is "what’s it about?” With this book, that’s the hardest question you could ask about it, and the last one to be answered. OK, here’s a summary… imagine if Moll Flanders met Mrs Dalloway and they both decided to drop some acid and dance all night at a party at a commune just outside Norwich? You’re getting warmer. It’s about Esmeralda. Life, and Esmeralda, but not necessarily in that order. Structurally,it’s a novel that challenges our perceptions of time and memory, mingling past and present, as Esmeralda drifts downstream, through a series of scenes peopled with a rambling, picaresque cast of characters, some of whom are fleeting ghosts, never seen again, and some of whom remain to be significant. Actually, "drifts” is the wrong word there. A more appropriate nautical metaphor would be that Esmeralda crashes through life, like an out-of-control speedboat, leaving havoc bobbing in her turbulent wake.

No situation is too strange, no drug is off the menu, legal, illegal, or purely psychological. In this, her first novel, Jolie Booth has created Fifty Shades for the Trainspotting generation.

by Deborah Tyler-Bennett
(2017) 9 in x 6 in 211pp., pbk. In this, the final volume in the trilogy which began with Turned Out Nice Again and continued with Mice That Roared Deborah Tyler-Bennett brings the characters she has created up to the 1960s. The world of variety is fading from its former glory, and everywhere, television is king. Cooper and Bean are faced with some stark choices. Meanwhile, in the wider world, there is Beatlemania, and the first stirrings of what eventually would become the Summer of Love, even in Mansfield.

If you’ve already met Kari True in her previous adventure, Blood in the Air,
prepare to be reminded, and surprised. This time around, Kari finds
herself still partnered – some might say lumbered - with the snooty
"special advisor”, the elf Elathir Alaenrae, investigating the
mysterious death of Aldwin Heathley, a student, or "apprentice” as they
are known, in the Royal College of Magic. It was from one of its five
forbidding black towers that Aldwin apparently spread his arms and dived
to his rather messy doom, fifteen storeys later. Throughout the book,
Kari is also fighting two more battles, alongside the ongoing one
against evil in the form of zombies, murderers and assassins. Firstly
she has to reconcile her burgeoning feelings for Elathir and also for
Prince Kevan. But, perhaps more importantly, she is struggling with
herself, in particular her dubious origins and the many unanswered
questions they pose. Sombre, yet sometimes funny, pacy, fast-moving, yet
often lyrical, once more, in Towers of Blood, the author has again
successfully merged the fantasy and police procedural genres and once
more entertained and gripped us all with the exploits of the sassy,
sparky, sarcastic and, sometimes, deadly, persona of Corporal Kari
True.

The fourth book in the Twisted Minds series
by Gez Walsh
(2015) 6.875in x 4.25in pbk.,

Lauren lives on a soulless, neglected,
run-down housing estate, peopled by odd characters such as the woman
known as "Sweaty Betty" who is often found rummaging through the bins
outside the shops. A chance meeting between the two, over a shared bag
of chips on a park bench, sets off a terrifying chain of events which
culminates in the entire estate becoming a vast psychic battleground as
both Lauren and "Betty" become embroiled in the eternal struggle between
good and evil, trying to stop sinister demons from feasting on the
souls of the dead. During this conflict both Lauren and the woman she
once knew as "Betty” are also forced to confront their own inner demons,
and some very disturbing facts about their own lives, and actions,
including, in the case of "Betty”, the horrific death of her own
daughter in a fire. "Gripping” is too slight a word for this book, Gez
Walsh’s most masterful Twisted Minds take so far. Nothing is
real, nobody is who they say they are, and the plot has more twists than
a Chubby Checker tribute act. Beware picking this book up and beginning
to read it late at night, especially if you are of a nervous
disposition and you are at home alone… unless you actually like being scared stiff and unable to sleep, that is!

Jack has a
problem. He’s in a room with five weird people. Seriously weird. One’s a
beautiful young girl, one’s an accountant, one’s a professor, one’s a Rambo
lookalike, a psychotic mercenary, armed with various guns, knives and grenades,
and then there’s Catherine, who wears a food-smeared nightie and eats cakes
without bothering to cut them into slices first. And they are all in his mind. Or so he
thinks, as he lies in his hospital bed in a coma. Where they came from, how he created them, is
a mystery, as is how he came to be hovering between life and death in the first
place. Then something really odd
starts to happen. First, it seems that these people might actually be realin some way, and not just figments of his imagination after all, even though
he’s full of enough drugs to kill an elephant, and hooked up to what looks like
half the life-support equipment off Holby City. He starts talking to
them, and, more alarmingly, they start talking back, telling him things about himself that he’d forgotten, and
helping him piece together the scary, terrifying story of how he came to be in
a coma, in hospital, guarded by a policeman at his bedside. The more pieces of the
jigsaw he slots into place, the more he realises that his friends on the
"outside” are still in deadly danger. He must do something, but the only allies
he can call upon to help him are stuck in exactly the same state as he is – the
other inhabitants of "The Meeting Room”! This first book in Gez
Walsh’s Twisted Minds series is at times funny, gripping, scary and sad;
a thought-provoking, un-put-downable tale that rattles along at a terrific pace
towards an unexpected conclusion.

In Turned Out Nice Again, DeborahTyler-Bennett introduced us to a fine collection of engaging new friends. Alfand Shirl, Vi, Cooper and Bean ("the boys most likely to…”)Beryl, and the redoubtable Grandwem were allexpertly drawn and brought to life in those pages, plus a budgie called GeorgeFormby. Now,for them, and for everyone else, the war is over, and many things will never bethe same again, including the world of variety. A new, brash theme is echoingthrough the world of entertainment, and it comes from across the Atlantic.But notevery GI wedding has a happy ending, and sometimes Tin Pan Alley can become adead end, as Ruby discovers when she has to be rescued by the old gang. Thescene also shifts to Brighton,expertly-described, recalled back in the late 1950s and 1960s, as it was beforeit became "Be-Right-On”. Seedy, and dangerous, back in the days of the teddyboys and the razor gangs, with characters, such as Phil and Gilda and theirdangerously-unbalanced love affair, and Billy’s unacknowledged son Ted, who becomesthe smallest Teddy Boy in Brighton, whichleads him into contact with some heavy people, including the scar-faced VimoFielding, the "Don” of Burgess Hill. All of us who felt that Grandwem and herfamily were far too entertaining to lose after only one book will be delightedto see them back once again, Mansfield’sanswer to the Larkins!